God and Man; perfect God and perfect Man

The Text

This is Part II’s thesis, and it is built with the same care as Part I’s. Verse 3 had said the catholic faith is this; verse 30 says the right faith is this — and then states, in three tight movements, the doctrine of the one person in two natures. One subject: our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Two predicates held without compromise: God and man. And then the creed does what it always does — it fences the claim on both sides at once. He is God of the substance of the Father, begotten before the ages. He is man of the substance of his mother, born in time. Perfect God, perfect man.

The symmetry is the argument. Two substances (the Father’s, the mother’s), two births (before the ages, in time), two natures — and one Son. And the creed slips in the clause that cost the church a council to win: ex anima rationali — Christ has a rational soul. Not merely a human body with God thinking inside it. A human mind. A human will. The reason that small phrase is there is the reason this verse is, pastorally, one of the most powerful in the entire creed: a Christ who did not assume a human mind cannot heal the human mind — and the creed will not give us a Savior who skipped the part of us that hurts most.

Translation Notes

est ergo fides recta — “the right faith therefore is.” The deliberate echo of verse 3 (fides catholica haec est). Part I’s thesis defined the Trinity; Part II’s thesis defines the person of Christ. The creed signals that what follows is to the Incarnation what the litany was to the Trinity: the load-bearing center.

the double ex substantia. Deus … ex substantia Patris — homo … ex substantia matris. The parallel is exact and theologically total. As God, the Son is of the substance of the Father — consubstantial with the Father, the Nicene homoousios (see [[nicene-creed/of-one-being-with-the-father]]). As man, he is of the substance of his mother — consubstantial with us, his humanity genuinely drawn from Mary, not a heavenly substance merely passing through her. Chalcedon’s twofold formula — “consubstantial with the Father as to the Godhead, consubstantial with us as to the manhood” — is here in Gallic Latin.

ante saecula genitus / in saeculo natus — two births. Begotten before the ages (the eternal generation, the deity — see [[athanasian-creed/the-father-eternal]]); born in the world / in time (the nativity, the humanity). One Son, born twice — eternally of the Father, temporally of the Virgin. The patristic “two births” that Leo’s Tome made standard.

perfectus Deus, perfectus homo — and the word that is always misheard. Perfectus here does not mean “morally perfect” or “flawless.” It is the Latin for complete, whole, entire, lacking nothing (from perficere, to finish, to bring to completeness). Perfectus Deus: nothing of deity is missing — against Arianism. Perfectus homo: nothing of humanity is missing — against Apollinarianism and Docetism. The verse is not praising Christ’s sinlessness here (that is true but is not this word’s point); it is insisting that both natures are entire.

ex anima rationali et humana carne subsistens — the clause a council was fought for. “Subsisting of a rational soul and human flesh.” Apollinaris of Laodicea had taught that in Christ the divine Logos took the place of the human rational soul (the nous, the mind): a human body, but God where the human mind should be. The church condemned it (Constantinople, 381), and Gregory of Nazianzus stated the reason in the axiom that governs this whole verse: to aproslēpton atherapeuton — “the unassumed is unhealed.” If the Son did not assume a human mind, the human mind is not redeemed. The creed therefore specifies: anima rationalis — a rational soul — and humana caro — human flesh. A whole human being, interior included.

Historical Context

Chalcedon, in Gallic dress. Verse 30 presupposes the Definition of Chalcedon (451): one person, two natures, “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation,” consubstantial with the Father and consubstantial with us. The Athanasian Creed, from southern Gaul around 500, is among the earliest Western catechetical digests of that conciliar settlement — Chalcedon turned into something a community could chant.

Apollinaris and the human mind of Christ. The ex anima rationali clause is aimed at a specific, defeated error with a long afterlife. Apollinaris reasoned that two complete things (a whole God and a whole man) could not be one; so he made the humanity incomplete — flesh without a human mind, the Logos supplying the rational soul. It was condemned not for tidiness but for soteriology: a Christ lacking a human mind leaves the human mind unsaved. Gregory of Nazianzus’s Letter 101 is the classic refutation, and its principle — only what is assumed is healed — is why the creed bothers to specify the soul at all.

The reality of the flesh “of his mother.” Ex substantia matris also fences a second error: the Docetic and Gnostic notion that Christ’s flesh was heavenly, only appearing to be born of Mary, passing through her (in the old image) “as water through a pipe.” The creed insists the humanity is drawn from her substance — truly ours, truly mortal, truly flesh. (This is also the implicit logic of Theotokos, the title affirmed at Ephesus in 431: the one born of Mary’s substance is Dei Filius, the Son of God; what she bore was not a man later joined to God but God the Son incarnate.)

Lines of Interpretation

The two natures are catholic dogma. The live questions cluster where the creed places its emphasis: the completeness of the humanity — especially the human mind and will (Apollinarianism then; kenotic and “fully human” Christology now) — and the reality of the flesh from Mary.

Patristic

Tradition: Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter 101; Leo the Great, Tome; the Definition of Chalcedon; Cyril of Alexandria

The Fathers secured both natures entire and bound the completeness of the humanity to salvation: the unassumed is unhealed, so the Son took a human soul, mind, and will, not merely a body.

Strengths

• Grounds the ex anima rationali clause in the gospel itself — a partial humanity is a partial salvation
• Holds the double consubstantiality without compromise: fully God, fully us, one Son

Weaknesses

• “Two complete natures in one person” is exactly the point reason finds hardest; the creed asserts it and (rightly) does not explain it
• The soteriological axiom assumes a participatory frame modern hearers may not share

Scholastic

Tradition: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III qq. 2–19

Aquinas works out the integrity of Christ’s humanity in detail: a true human soul, a true human will, real human knowledge (including acquired, experiential knowledge), real human affections — all entire, all united in the person of the Word. Perfectus homo is unpacked nature-component by nature-component, none missing.

Strengths

• The most thorough account of what a complete humanity includes — soul, will, knowledge, passions — leaving Apollinarianism no foothold
• Keeps the union personal: the natures entire, the subject one

Weaknesses

• The detailed faculty-analysis can make the living Christ sound assembled from parts
• Aquinas’s account of Christ’s human knowledge (e.g., the beatific vision in the earthly Christ) is itself contested and strains the “like us” the verse implies

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes II.13; the controversy with the Anabaptist “celestial flesh” (Menno Simons, Melchior Hoffman)

The verse’s ex substantia matris was relitigated almost verbatim in the sixteenth century. Some radical Anabaptists (Hoffman, Menno) taught a “celestial flesh” — Christ’s humanity not drawn from Mary but heavenly, passing through her. Calvin (II.13) defended exactly this clause: Christ’s flesh is truly ours, truly from the Virgin’s substance, or he is not our kinsman-redeemer and the gospel fails.

Strengths

• A concrete demonstration that ex substantia matris is not antiquarian — the church had to win it again
• Ties the true humanity to the logic of redemption: only real kin can redeem kin

Weaknesses

• The Reformed defense, framed forensically, can underplay the participatory note (the commercium) the verse also carries
• Reformed reticence about Mary can obscure how much ex substantia matris actually says about her role

Eastern Orthodox

Tradition: the Cappadocians; Maximus the Confessor (the human will of Christ); the Theotokos; the iconodule argument (Nicaea II, 787)

The East presses the completeness of the humanity to its furthest point: Maximus, against Monothelitism, secured Christ’s true human will (a logical extension of ex anima rationali). And the East draws out ex substantia matris: because the Son truly took flesh from Mary, he is depictable — the holy icon is possible precisely because the Word became real, circumscribable flesh (Nicaea II).

Strengths

• Carries the verse’s logic consistently: a rational soul implies a human will, also assumed, also healed
• The iconographic argument makes ex substantia matris visible — the reality of the flesh is confessable in paint, not only in propositions

Weaknesses

• The will-question (Monothelitism) is a refinement the creed does not itself reach; reading it in is legitimate but additive
• Strong Marian and iconodule conclusions are received unevenly across the wider church

Modern / Ecumenical

Tradition: kenotic Christology (Charles Gore, P. T. Forsyth, and later kenoticists); the “fully human Jesus” of modern Christology; the Chalcedonian retrieval (Coakley, Oliver Crisp)

The modern pressure falls exactly on this verse. Kenotic Christology, taking perfectus homo and the human mind with full seriousness (a Jesus who grew in wisdom, who did not know the day or the hour, who was genuinely tempted), proposes that the Son “emptied himself” of some divine prerogatives to live a real human consciousness. The Chalcedonian retrieval replies that this risks perfectus Deus — a Son temporarily less than fully God — and that the creed’s both … perfect must be kept whole.

Strengths

• Kenoticism rightly refuses a Docetic “Jesus” with a divine mind merely simulating humanity — it honors ex anima rationali in modern form
• The retrieval rightly insists perfectus Deus and perfectus homo are both non-negotiable; the verse’s symmetry is its meaning

Weaknesses

• Strong kenoticism, to secure the full humanity, can compromise the full deity — the exact imbalance the creed’s symmetry forbids
• Some Chalcedonian defenses secure perfectus Deus so firmly that the genuinely limited human mind the verse also asserts (and the gospels portray) is left underweight

Wesleyan Voice

Here, as at verse 29, the central Wesleyan fact is that the deleted creed’s Christology survives whole in Methodist law. The Articles of Religion, Article II — “two whole and perfect natures … joined together in one person” — is perfectus Deus, perfectus homo in English; “whole and perfect” translates perfectus exactly in its true sense of complete, not flawless. Wesley struck the Quicumque; he kept Chalcedon verbatim.

The Wesleyan weight falls on perfectus homo, ex anima rationali — the complete humanity — because the entire Wesleyan ordo salutis depends on it. Wesley’s doctrine of sanctification is the renewal of the whole person — mind, affections, will — in love. That renewal is possible only because the Son assumed the whole person: a human mind to heal our minds, human affections to heal our affections, a human will to heal our wills. “What is not assumed is not healed” is the silent premise beneath Christian perfection. If Christ took only a body and remained serenely divine within it, then the human interior — the part Wesley’s whole theology of the heart is about — was never assumed and cannot be sanctified. The anti-Apollinarian clause is not, for Wesley’s heirs, a fifth-century technicality; it is the structural condition of the Wesleyan gospel.

Wesley held the true flesh from Mary as plainly: the Explanatory Notes on Galatians 4:4 (“made of a woman”) and Luke 1 affirm a genuine humanity drawn from her substance, against any docetic softening — for the same reason Calvin pressed it, that only a real kinsman can redeem kin (Hebrews 2:14–17, a favorite Wesleyan text).

Charles Wesley sang the symmetry until it became reflex. “Veiled in flesh the Godhead see, / hail the incarnate Deity” — perfectus Deus under real flesh. “Our God contracted to a span, / incomprehensibly made man” — the eternal one in saeculo natus. “Made flesh for our sake, / that we might partake / the nature divine” — the admirabile commercium, the double consubstantiality turned into the logic of salvation and set to a tune. Where the creed states the two substances, Charles makes the congregation confess them in carols before they could spell consubstantial.

Hymnody

This verse is the doctrinal spine of the Christmas hymnal — every carol that holds the two natures together in one stanza is singing it.

“O come, all ye faithful” states the double consubstantiality almost in the creed’s own words: “God of God, Light of Light … very God, begotten, not created” (ex substantia Patris) and “lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb … in flesh appearing” (ex substantia matris). “Hark! the herald angels sing”: “veiled in flesh the Godhead see … pleased as man with man to dwell.” “Of the Father’s love begotten” sets ante saecula genitus beside the Virgin’s womb. “Let earth and heaven combine”: “our God contracted to a span, / incomprehensibly made man.”

The ex anima rationali clause — the complete, feeling, growing humanity — is sung most tenderly in “Once in royal David’s city”: “he came down to earth from heaven … and through all his wondrous childhood / he would honour and obey … tears and smiles like us he knew.” That last line is the anti-Apollinarian doctrine in a children’s carol: a Christ with a real human soul, who actually wept and actually smiled, like us. The hymnody does not argue perfectus homo; it sings the tears.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

This verse contains what may be the most under-preached pastoral treasure in the entire creed, hidden inside its most technical-sounding clause.

Preach the rational soul as the floor of every comfort. “Of a rational soul and human flesh” sounds like a heresy-hunter’s footnote. It is, in fact, the doctrinal foundation of the church’s care for the suffering interior life. Christ did not assume only a body and remain untouched and serene inside it. He took a human mind, human emotions, a human will — and therefore there is no region of the human inside that he did not enter and does not heal. The panicked mind: he sweat in Gethsemane and asked for the cup to pass. The grieving heart: he wept at a grave he was about to open. The tempted will: he was tried in every way as we are. The dark of the soul: “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” Gregory’s axiom, turned from warning into gospel, is the pastoral word: what was not assumed is not healed — and he assumed all of it. For the depressed believer who suspects Christ only ever floated above human anguish, and for the anxious one who thinks faith means he should not feel what he feels, this clause is the answer the creed spent a council securing: your Lord has a human soul, and he took yours into his.

Name the comfortable Docetism. The idol this verse destroys is not the crude old heresy but its respectable modern survival: the serene Jesus of sentimental piety who only seemed to suffer, who was never really afraid, never really tempted, never really in the dark, because the divinity inside him kept the human part insulated. That Christ is useless to a hurting congregation, and the creed forbids him. Perfectus homo — a complete man, soul and all — means the suffering was not simulated. The pastoral skill is to take the stoic-Christ away from people gently, because they often cling to him out of reverence, and to give them the creed’s Christ instead: not less divine, but truly, wholly human, in exactly the place they are hurting.

Teach the word perfectus. One sentence in a sermon or class repays itself for years: perfect here does not mean “flawless,” it means “complete.” He is perfect God — nothing of God missing. He is perfect man — nothing of a human being missing. And therefore — the turn that matters pastorally — your humanity is not a defect to be escaped, not the embarrassing part of you that grace tolerates until heaven. It is the very thing God took, entire, and is redeeming. The God-and-man of this verse did not come to rescue people from being human; he became perfectus homo to heal humanity from the inside. The congregation that hears that has been handed both halves of the verse at once — the deity that can save and the humanity that means they, in all their unfinished humanness, are exactly what is being saved. Then send them to the carol they already know, and let them hear “tears and smiles like us he knew” as the doctrine it actually is.

Further Reading

• Luke 1:35; 2:52 — conceived of the Virgin; Jesus increased in wisdom (the real, growing human mind)
• John 1:14; 11:33–35 — the Word was made flesh; Jesus wept, troubled in spirit
• Matthew 26:38–39 — Gethsemane: my soul is very sorrowful … not my will (human soul and will)
• Galatians 4:4 — made of a woman (the flesh from his mother)
• Romans 1:3–4; Philippians 2:7; Hebrews 2:14–17; 4:15; 5:7–9 — true kinship, true temptation, true humanity
• Gregory of Nazianzus, Letter 101 (“the unassumed is unhealed”)
• Leo the Great, Tome; the Definition of Chalcedon (451)
• Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ
• Maximus the Confessor, on the human will of Christ
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III qq. 2–19
• John Calvin, Institutes II.13 (against the “celestial flesh”)
• The Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church (1784), Article II
• John Wesley, Explanatory Notes on Luke 1, Galatians 4, Hebrews 2; Standard Sermons, Sermon 5
• Charles Wesley, “Let earth and heaven combine”; “Hark! the herald angels sing”
• P. T. Forsyth, The Person and Place of Jesus Christ (1909); Charles Gore, The Incarnation of the Son of God (1891) — the kenotic case
• Sarah Coakley, “What Does Chalcedon Solve and What Does It Not?”; Oliver D. Crisp, Divinity and Humanity (Cambridge, 2007) — the Chalcedonian retrieval